Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
The Fourth Sunday of Easter - May 3, 2020
Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10
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Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Yes, four weeks in, and it’s still Easter. Thank God.
This Easter may be more like the first Easter than any I can remember. Like the disciples, most of us weren’t able to gather around a Pascal fire to mark the Queen of Feasts. The threats that surround us, and our fear of our own exposure and death have kept us huddled indoors, like those first followers of Jesus. And, like them, many of us Christians may feel defeated, lost, anxious, and angry. Or perhaps we’re unutterably tired and can’t be bothered to work up an Alleluia.
We also, like those early disciples, have the sense that something is forever different, though we don’t know yet what that something is.
Many of our religious authorities, even in so-called “mainstream” Christianity, have sold their souls to the emperor for political gain. Sin and death, nationalism and racism, lies and corruption rule the society in which we live.
This is the context now, as it was then, and, frankly, as it has always been, for the good, improbable, and astounding news that yes, Jesus Christ is risen. Yes, he is risen here, now, and forever. God has already won her victory over the forces of evil, division, and death and has opened the way to abundant life for all of creation.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard stories of the first disciples’ encounters with the risen Lord. These encounters lay a foundation for a life lived in the fullness of Christ, a life transformed by God’s promise to bring life out of death. This week, the lections move us from encounter to integration and begin to show us what the resurrected life actually looks like in practice. And what it looks like is sheep.
I would so much rather the resurrected life look like clever crows, beautiful foxes, or fierce wolves. But it would seem God is not nearly as interested as I am in my beauty, cleverness, or courage. In fact, God doesn’t seem to be too interested in my my at all. And that’s one of the lessons of the sheep.
You see, sheep have two defining virtues: their unity with one another and their unity with their shepherd. Sheep huddle together and move as one body. Although individuals have personality, they don’t embody their individuality at the expense of the unity of the flock. In fact, as with bees or forests, it really doesn’t make sense to speak of a single sheep. A flock of sheep is what biologists call a superorganism, a group of individuals who are so in sync with one another that you can only truly speak of the collective as one being made up of many persons.
With sheep, as with bees, that one being—the flock—responds to one other being—the shepherd. And basically to no one or nothing else. Sure, they might collectively run from perceived threats. But they don’t follow anyone or anything but the shepherd. Over time sheep become so attuned to the shepherd that they know his voice. They run to him, follow him, respond to him.
I’ll admit, it’s not a very subtle metaphor. But like the disciples to whom Jesus is speaking, as obvious as the image is, we don’t get it. Or, we don’t get it on a level that moves us to embody it. None of is born or raised a sheep. At the best of times we’re all really wolves, crows, or foxes in sheep’s clothing, trying our best to follow God’s voice, all the while distracted and torn by our various cravings, fears, and hopes.
It isn’t just our cravings, of course, that complicate our integration into the sheepfold. One of the greatest hurdles to transformation in Christ, is our earnest and real desire to be humble and good and to love and follow God. Hidden in this desire for goodness in its various forms, is usually the belief that our goodness will finally complete us. And that, once we‘re complete, we won’t need God anymore. We secretly believe that if we love God, if we strive for goodness and humility, we will get to be perfect versions of ourselves. And that system of belief and striving is one of the subtlest and most insidious kinds of idolatry, and one to which religious folks are particularly vulnerable.
Jesus himself reminds us that only God is good. God is the source and the terminus of all goodness. Whatever is good or true or beautiful in this world is a reflection of God’s beauty, God’s goodness, God’s truth. All our effort to claim that goodness for our own is vanity and pride.
Really, it’s fear. Fear that, if we aren’t good we aren’t anything at all. And fear, too, that God’s promise to bring life from death may not really be true, after all.
Dame Julian captures this dynamic when she writes that
“some of us believe that God is all powerful and may do everything; and that he is all wise and can do everything; but as for believing that he is all love and will [emphasis mine] do everything, there we hold back. In my view nothing hinders God’s lovers more than the failure to understand this.”1Our hope in the midst of the darkness that surrounds us today must be in God’s goodness alone. By our own power, we can only, at best, create a kind of resuscitation of the old life we knew. Only God can bring forth from death the life that really is life.
The image of the sheepfold, following the loving voice of its shepherd, is an image of the new creation, of humanity as fully and finally redeemed, brought forth into a new innocence. This innocence is not that of Eden, of those who have never known sin and death and fear. But rather of those who have sinned and died again and again and again, and have, through the mercy and goodness of God, been reborn. It is an innocence that is genuinely wise and humble, because it knows that not only is God all-powerful and all-wise, but that God is also all love, continually shepherding us to new and deeper life.
Julian concludes her thoughts in this passage by saying that “As by his courtesy God forgives our sins when we repent, even so he wills that we [emphasis mine] should forgive our sins; and so give up our senseless worrying and faithless fear.”2
And who knows? In the end, perhaps, we will not all be sheep, for as Isaiah tells us, the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the kid. If for now we remain crows and foxes and wolves, dressed in sheep’s clothing or not, so be it. In God’s own time and in God’s own way we will be reborn into whatever we truly are. And then we will hear our shepherd calling us each by our true name.
For this much is certain. God is good and that is everything.
And yes, Christ is risen! Alleluia!
1. As quoted in Robert Llewelyn, All Shall Be Well, p. 9.
2. Ibid., p. 10.
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